OUR PRINCIPLES

The Social Observatory helps projects develop adaptive capacity by ensuring that both implementors and beneficiaries receive feedback as to how projects are working in the short and long term. The following four principles highlight our approach to making sure projects are supported to reach their full potential.

Monitoring Well

High frequency, accurate, information with easy to understand dashboards and reports, to enable project staff to make better decisions.

Democratizing Data

Giving citizens the ability to design, collect and analyze their own survey data to make more informed individual and collective decisions.

Measuring the size of an impact is not enough. We have to understand the underlying mechanisms behind it. This requires mixing econometric analysis with rigorous qualitative analysis.

Therapy not Prozac

Improving implementation requires an approach that is less like Prozac and more like therapy – an interactive process where interventions gradually learn how to adapt to different contexts.